Lustrum

By: Robert Harris

Narrated by: Oliver Ford-Davies

Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

The year is 63 BC. In an age of political titans, Cicero stands supreme: the senior consul of the Roman republic. But jealous rivals are determined to destroy him and seize control of the state. To thwart them will take all his guile - and will lead him, and Rome, to the brink of destruction.

Robert Harris's Lustrum is a thriller that pitches the listener into the power struggles and vicious factionalism of the Roman republic at one of its most tumultuous moments, as Cicero is alerted to a plot to overthrow the government and take over the state. The conspiracy is led by the aristocratic politician Catalina, backed by other, shadowy factions; even Julius Caesar is implicated. Undeterred, Cicero devotes himself to exposing the treachery, and after a bloody struggle, emerges triumphant.

But the gods are pitiless - and the most talented men over-reach themselves. When the sexually voracious senator and nobleman Clodius is put on trial, accused of entering a sacred women-only religious ritual in pursuit of Caesar's wife, Cicero finds himself embroiled in the case as the reluctant star witness for the prosecution. He has made many enemies, and as Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey grasp political power, he discovers that he has sown the seeds of his own downfall.

Meticulously researched and brilliantly written, Lustrum is an entirely self-contained novel, but it is also a continuation of Cicero's story as told in Robert Harris's best-selling Imperium. A third Roman volume will complete the trilogy in 2011.

©2009 Robert Harris (P)2009 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"With Lustrum, Harris has surpassed himself. It is one of the most exciting thrillers I have ever read... I am already on tenterhooks for the final instalment..."( The Evening Standard)

"...You can see why, once he has mentally pulled on his toga and sandals, Harris communicates such a strong sense of imperial Rome - the book is awesomely well-informed about the minutiae of everyday life, but in a vivid, not a tedious way - and why the narrative verve is so infectious. This is a subject Harris has lived with for about nine years now (give or take time out to write The Ghost), and it shows." (The Guardian)

"Lustrum stands on its own merits as a thoroughly engaging historical novel. Republican Rome, with all its grandeur and corruption, has rarely been made as vivid as it appears in Harris's book. The allure of power and the perils that attend it have seldom been so brilliantly anatomised in a thriller." (The Sunday Times)

"Harris never makes his comparisons between Rome and modern Britain explicit, but they are certainly there. And that's the principal charm of his ancient thrillers - their up-to-dateness." (The Sunday Telegraph)

"Harris has taken the DNA of Cicero's great speeches and animated them with utterly believable dialogue... Harris's greatest triumph is perhaps in the evocation of Roman politics, the constant bending of ancient principles before the realities of power, and in his depiction of what it was like to live in the city: the mud, the guttering lamps, the smell of the blood from the temples. I wish I had read this book at 13, before I started ploughing through Cicero's speeches. I would take my hat off to Harris, if I hadn't already dashed it to the ground in jealous awe." (Boris Johnson, Mail on Sunday)

Abridged version

The book version is still way better. This one cuts the more poignant scenes and all those juicy details in the book.

Do not start Robert Harris here!

As someone who has enjoyed all of Harris' books, I will advice to you listen to his other works before this one. It is simply too unfocused to ever get me wound up in the story. It is all also too short, and I don't understand why it has been abgridged (unless the unabridged version would have been even more unfocused).

I recomend instead you hear Pompeii (ancient rome setting) or Ghost (modern thriller).